Samsung Unveils Flexible OLED Prototype Smartphone

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Samsung has been a big backer of flexible displays for a while now, and it is finally getting some prototype phone-like designs in to people’s hands at CES 2013. Flexible OLED displays are looking to be the next big thing in display technology, giving manufacturers the means to come up with completely different form-factors than are available now. For the moment Samsung seems to have been pretty conservative with its prototype design here, keeping the popular slate form-factor but with the display bending around the edges to create a side-display of sorts.

The device shown had a screen that was 5″ and said to be “about 720p” resolution. While it was essentially just a digital photo frame with slideshows of a fairly standard looking TouchWiz user interface, the real meat of the news here is the information displayed on the edges of the screen. Samsung said it envisions cases that cover all but the side of the phone, letting you quick-glance at information like stocks, text messages, emails and other notification-type information without removing the phone from the case. This would certainly come in handy when you want to just check a notification quickly without having to interact with the device, a concept Samsung has experimented with in the past.

Personally I’d like to see this display give us unbreakable phones. Unbreakable Plane Technology has been rumored for flagship Samsung devices since the beginning of 2012, and this is likely one step closer to achieving that reality.